Spiritual Touchstone: Dreaming the Future of The Good Table

Dreaming the Future of The Good Table

By Melinda V. McLain

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. – Eleanor Roosevelt

“Futuring” is a special discipline within the humanities that is used a lot by businesses trying to get ahead of new market opportunities.  It is also a fairly complicated and incredibly inexact science with high stakes outcomes for companies seeking to remain profitable in a rapidly-changing world.

While studying for my doctor of ministry, we did study some of the disciplines of futuring and imagined ways to apply these insights in a local setting such as a church or community service organization. Amongst many startling things I learned from this course work was that “the future is plural, not singular”.

I remember thinking that while it is easy to say the future is plural, not singular, it is very hard to live with that idea. It’s much more comfortable to think that life will progress in a more predictable fashion. But if we haven’t learned anything else from all the unexpected shifts that have happened these past few years, we now know that the future is truly unpredictable! I know I didn’t have “global pandemic” on my bingo card! And five years ago when I first met Gavin Raders of Planting Justice, I didn’t really have “constant threat from wildfires” and “global weirding” weather patterns due to climate change on my future possibilities radar.

Although some of these big cultural and weather shifts have been surprising, fairly ordinary and predictable events often lead to different futures too. For example, a cancer diagnosis changes everything for a particular family - at the very least in the short term - and sometimes forever. Similarly, new neighbors can bring gifts and skills into the community that are dazzling and delightful. And unexpected kindness from friends and even strangers can sometimes change everything.

When I meet people in the community who are peripherally interested in The Good Table project, I am almost always asked, “when will you open?” And if I found Aladdin’s lamp tomorrow - I assure you this might be my first question! It is definitely a question when I wake up in the middle of the night worried about how to get this construction process finished. What I don’t worry about is whether we will eventually open and that this project will be a great boon for our communities.  It’s just a matter of when and how, not if or maybe. We will finish the renovation and we will someday open The Good Table Café and Planting Justice Nursery! We will see this beautiful dream come true and we are so grateful for all of you who have helped in any way.

Still, we have some big stumbling blocks to overcome. As many of you know, we had a major break-in in mid-June by wire thieves that destroyed or removed all our rough electrical from the building resulting in a loss of over $100,000 and time that we cannot ever get back. But this isn’t the only burglary we have had since we acquired the property in April of 2019. An electrical generator was stolen in 2019, one of our contractor’s trucks (which he managed to recover!) in 2020, and Planting Justice has had two trailers stolen in addition to the major break-in in June.

We did foresee that our site would be a target for crime and we did - and do have - security measures in place, but those efforts clearly have not been adequate and our whole security system was stolen as part of the big burglary in June. I have also lost count as to how many padlocks we have lost that have been cut by thieves.

The security system and locks have been replaced, but there are other unexpected consequences too. What I didn’t expect was how depressed and broken-hearted I would feel after so many burglaries. I suspect I was just lucky by virtue of social privilege to not have been a regular crime victim before. And perhaps I was naïve to think that doing something “good” for the community would lead to a “good” set of future outcomes. And yet, I’m tired of bad news, exhausted by grief, and yet ready to make progress instead of constantly being in recovery mode from yet more bad news.

The art and craft of futuring has become more and more challenging - even for businesses with tremendous resources - let alone community-based groups like ours. But I still believe in our dream and have hope that we will keep moving forward and faith that we will open eventually.

Thank you for your support in terms of kind words, volunteer time, talent, and your financial gifts too. It all makes a difference!